Do Animals Have Emotions? A Debate

An advocate and a skeptic dispute whether non-human animals have emotions.

Do non-human animals such as cats, dogs, and chimpanzees have emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, and anger? What kind of reasoning is required to justify the judgment that animals have emotions? Here is a dialogue between an advocate of animal emotions and a skeptic.

Advocate: It is obvious that humans are not the only animals that have emotions. Anyone who has ever had a pet cat or dog knows that feeding them and petting them makes them happy, whereas dangers make them afraid and angry.

Skeptic: Not so fast. There is no doubt that such animals can be rewarded and threatened, but their behavior is no guarantee that they are experiencing the emotions that people have.

Advocate: Your skepticism is bizarre. It reminds me of the philosophical problem of other minds, where the skeptic says, "I know that I have a mind, but how can I possibly know that anyone else has a mind?"

Skeptic: The parallel between arguments about other human minds and ones about animal minds is not good because other people are much more similar to you than cats and dogs are. Can you provide a more substantial argument?

Advocate: Gladly. The relevant kind of argument is what philosophers call inference to the best explanation, which is the standard way in science and everyday life of arguing about the existence of something you cannot directly observe. Most scientists believe in atoms because that hypothesis provides the best explanation of many phenomena in chemistry and physics. Similarly, we infer that the best explanation of other people's behavior is that they have minds just like us. Alternative explanations, such as those that suggest other people are robots controlled by space aliens, are utterly implausible. Analogously, the best explanation of the behavior of cats and dogs is that they are experiencing emotions.

Skeptic: But wait, you neglect the fundamental principle of inference to the best explanation that you have to consider alternative hypotheses. For cats and dogs, we can explain their behaviors merely on the basis of reward mechanisms and threat response mechanisms that operate in all animals, including humans. When a cat is purring or a dog is wagging its tail, this response results from neural activity in its reward centers such as the nucleus accumbens. When a cat is yowling or a dog is growling, this results from neural activity in its threat detection centers such as the amygdala. These explanations are much simpler than making the additional assumption that cats and dogs are actually experiencing emotions of happiness and fear. Unlike people, pets cannot tell us that they are happy or anxious.

Advocate: But thanks to neuroscience, we know that all mammal brains are similar with respect to the overall organization. In the argument about other human minds, we not only use the hypothesis that other persons have minds in order to explain the behavior, we know enough about human neuroanatomy to be able to explain that it is because they have brains like ours. We increasingly know the mechanisms by which brains make minds, which operate across humans and other mammals. Admittedly, this argument doesn't apply to insects, reptiles, and fish, which have much simpler brains. Whether it applies to birds is hard to say, because they don't have a prefrontal cortex, although they do share a similar brain structure: the nidopallium caudolaterale.

Skeptic: The analogy between the brains of humans and non-human animals is not as good as you suppose. The brains of humans are far larger than those of cats and dogs, around 86 billion neurons as opposed to less than a billion. In particular, humans have a much larger prefrontal cortex, the area that is used for complex reasoning, so they are much more capable of making complex assessments of situations. If emotions were just physiological responses, then it would be plausible that animal emotions are the same as those in people. But physiology alone is not enough to discriminate between emotions such as fear and anger, which require an appraisal of situations with respect to situations and goals. This limitation is why non-human animals are incapable of complex human emotions such as shame, guilt, and fear of embarrassment.

Advocate: We are not talking about such emotions that depend on complexities of language and culture, but about much more basic emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. These do not require a linguistically and culturally mediated appraisal of the situation, merely that an animal can have some nonverbal ways of appreciating whether its goals such as food and safety are being satisfied or threatened. With respect to these, the neuroanatomy of mammals is sufficiently similar to that of humans to provide analogy-based support for the inference that animal emotions are the best explanation for their behavior.

Skeptic: But the analogy remains weak, and you still haven't recognized that the alternative explanations of animal behavior based on reward and threat mechanisms are simpler than the attribution of emotions, making fewer assumptions about mental states. I suspect that your real reason for wanting to believe in animal emotions has nothing to do with inference to the best explanation. It's just a motivated inference: you want to believe that animals have emotions because you want them to feel about you the way that you feel about them. People love their cats and dogs, so they naturally want to be loved back.

Advocate: Even if people have this motivation, it does not undermine the basic logic of the inference. Simplicity is not a standalone criterion for inference to the best explanation but has to be balanced against explanatory breadth. Attributing emotions to animals can explain aspects of their behavior that mere reward and threat mechanisms do not cover.

Skeptic: To make this convincing, you need to specify the kinds of behavior that cannot easily be accounted for by reward and threat mechanisms, and to show that animal brains are capable of the appraisals that contribute to emotions in human brains. Until then, it is better to remain at least undecided about whether animals have emotions.

References

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

de Waal, F. B. M. (2017). Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? New York: Norton.

LeDoux, J. E. (2015). Anxious: Using the brain to understand and treat fear and anxiety. New York: Viking.

It's clear some people have a soft spot for animals. But the bleeding-heart agenda really rears its head whenever I see postulates passed off as self-evidently true.

"You must respect animal life." Why?

"Because animal life has value!" Really? What evidence do you have of this intrinsic worth? Bears don't seem to respect a fish's value.

"Because they think! They're alive!" What's your point?

"Well I uh...I just love them soooooo much!"

The skeptic argues from reason. Fact is, there's no real evidence to support the notion animals feel emotion. Those advocates argue from a skewed personal testimony.

Now don't get me wrong, we shouldn't cause unnecessary suffering to animals, but we know for a fact animals have pain receptors. However, there is little to support the rhetoric that aims to personify them. Killing an animal does not hold the same moral weight as killing a human.

This is purely theoretical, but would you as a skeptic accept using people at the top end of the empathy quotient scale (particularly emotional reactivity) as a way of assessing emotions in animals?

I.e. if someone with a highly developed mirror system in the brain that processes emotions in other people with marked brain activity in this region produces the same level of activity when engaging with animals as evidence of emotions in animals?

You say, "Killing an animal does not hold the same moral weight as killing a human."
Who says?
And why?
Answer: Because the Bible says so. And other human religious texts and doctrine as well.
Here's the problem: The Bible and all those other religious texts and utterances are demonstrably false narratives which are categorically impossible. They also contain numerous -- again-- demonstrably false and harmful teachings.
And the Bible and these other religious texts and utterances constitute the moral foundation for humanity.
So, human cultures and individuals base their sense of repugnance for the taking of innocent human life upon manufactured dogma, which itself is a false fabrication.
As you well know, a few cultures take a different moral view of the relative moral worth of animal life, compared to human life. Indigenous peoples on the American, African, Australian, and Asian continents held animal life in nearly as high a regard as human life in these cultures' religious traditions, shocking and offending many a Westerner. Yet upon closer examination, we can readily understand why these indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures held these moral values. They were profoundly dependent upon and closely involved with the lives of the animals aroynd them, not only for food but also for clothing, shelter, tools, and other life necessities. Hunting an animal to extinction was not an option. Nor was indifference to the animal's well being, including its own ability to procure food, water, shelter, mates, etc.
Therefore, respect, reverence, fear, and love for the animal life and habitat life around them, to the point of revering animals' lives similar to human ones, made moral sense for these cultures. Moral judgements are, therefore, relative to culture and in the case of post-hunter gatherer societies, grounded upon false, metaphysical belief systems and are not incontrovertable facts. As a social scientist, you and the animal emotion skeptic should be wary of basing moral qualitative judgements on demonstrably false, culturally relative hypotheses.
You importantly also omit any mention of fMRI imaging and PET scan studies which clearly show that mammals possess the structures responsible for human emotions and that these structures function in all the ways identical to these structures' function in humans.
And dogs and cats with the symptoms of depression, anxiety, grief, uncontrolled anger, dementia, and other emotional maladies are successfully treated with medications developed to treat these conditions in humans. Again, fMRI and PET studies show that these psychoactive medications produce identical therapeutic effects in the same brain structures as they do in humans.
I doubt all of this would be possible if mammalian brains, especially the higher mammalian ones, were substantially different from our brains in structure and/or function.

"I suspect that your real reason for wanting to believe in animal emotions has nothing to do with inference to the best explanation. It's just a motivated inference: you want to believe that animals have emotions because you want them to feel about you the way that you feel about them. People love their cats and dogs, so they naturally want to be loved back."

I think most of us are no longer interested in the self-righteous glee of those who choose to interpret our interest in the full range of animal experience as a desperate attempt by animal lovers to feel less lonely. Indeed it is a bizarre feature of so many human minds to be incapable of imagining a motivation for a behavior or inquiry that is not directly tied to some reciprocated reward.

But what is most frustrating about this argument is that it assumes that your own skepticism does not have some underlying motivation. The virtue of modern, "Western" society begins to fall apart if we interrogate the intellectual and methodological foundations of sciences that have always regarded the natural world and its inhabitants as objects of analysis divorced from human complexity. The alleged empirical rationality that considered animals to be automata also sought to use evidence and a parsimonious explanation to prove the biological, intellectual, and moral inferiority of people of African descent. To suggest that your interpretation of the existing evidence cannot be corrupted is ahistorical and pretends that the very fabric of our society and psychology does not depend on hierarchies of being that use things like species, race, and nationality as criteria. Our very existence, and the comfort we feel in knowing we are the most powerful and complicated beings whose actions are always already justified, is entirely dependent on the embedded assumption of animal difference and inferiority. For those of us who are curious about what it is like to be something other than ourselves, the burden of proof is many centuries of religious dogma, cultural messaging, policy, and science that lacked the technology and concepts to accurately evaluate animal emotions and intelligence. Not to mention subsidies for industrial agriculture and relentless propaganda.

You are perfectly welcome to assume a sentimental motivation for our interest in animal psychology, but why would we not assume that your disinterest is motivated by a desire to feel okay about eating a burger?

Debating only from a theoretical/philosophical point of view never reveals any solid results and always remains a debate. If you really want answers you have to look deeper into the subject and like scientists do, you need to experiment and observe.

To answer the question "Do animals have feelings?" let's first narrow it down. There is a huge variety of animal species, all with different brains, bodies and features. The closest category to humans are Primates, a class of mammals to which we also belong to (don't forget we are animals too). Primates such as chimpanzees and gorillas have not only shown signs of complex emotions, but also intelligence. They have even learned to communicate with us using sign language and can learn to use tools (most basic technology), so when someone says animals "cannot tell us that they are happy or anxious" well the answer is some animals CAN and they DO tell us. The problem in most cases here is lack of communication. Animals have a different language from us humans, so to communicate with them we need to find a mutual language that both sides will understand. With chimps and gorillas sign language has worked, but that doesn't apply with every animal. However we can observe so far that every animal that we can communicate with, will also be capable of expressing some form of emotion, even if it's only basic.

Now here is where it gets interesting, and also to answer the question "do our pets have feelings?"... If we observe the wider class of mammalian species, we will discover that other animals show similar behaviour to primates and humans, which are not related to instinct or "on the basis of reward mechanisms". Such behaviours have been seen in dolphins, which are highly intelligent mammals (perhaps even more than dogs and somewhat equivalent to chimps), who have shown happiness, sadness, love and other feelings to their trainers. Similarly we have seen wild elephants mourn their deceased showing sadness (sometimes even drop tears), as well as empathy, happiness, fear and other emotions.

It's all about observation, and if you happen to own an animal it's even easier!

Have you ever noticed your dog coming to play with you without wanting to eat? Does your cat come and rub on you and make herself comfortable in your legs? What if you shout at them to scare them or annoy them by bothering them, do they go away? If the answer to all these questions is "yes" then, wouldn't you say this behaviour relates to feelings? Why would an animal come and sit near you? Why would you do that to a human? It's only if you like someone, love them, care for them or simply have empathy for them that you do that, so the same with animals. And if you don't like someone or they annoy you, you move away. Same again with animals. Haven't you seen how excited a dog gets when you take it outside for a walk? If you can't determine what physical behaviour shows happiness, then you are clearly not in a position to debate about emotions. And you don't need an animal to tell you it's happy. You just need to observe and understand its behaviour.

In my experience, all mammals that I have observed have feelings and perhaps other species too, but with mammals it is easier to understand and observe, because they show more emotion-based behaviours other than the basic hunger, fear and sexual (when wanting to mate) feelings.

You can also search in Wikipedia "Emotions in animals" for reference.

If you have any questions or other ideas I am happy to discuss (or debate).

As a person with a degree in biology that specializes in animal behaviour, I would say that yes, animals have very complex thoughts and feelings. From wolves to bumble bees, field work and clean, unbiased experiments show that all have thoughts and feelings. Many have intelligence, wisdom and heart that rivals or exceeds our own. In fact, we are limited in knowing just how intelligent, wise and loving animals are by the biases we bring to our experiments, limitations we have as individuals creating the experiments and interpreting what we see.